The war in Gaza is now in its fourth week and
is continuing unabated. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on July 16 that
four Palestinian children were killed by Israeli missiles near Gaza harbour – two boys, aged nine and 11, and two other both aged 10.
On the same day, the
BBC reported that at “10:26pm: Israeli tank fire has killed two
Palestinians, including a five-month-old baby, in the southern city of Gaza,
medical sources tell AFP [Agence France-Presse].”

I posted both reports on my newsfeed on
Facebook with a comment in Hebrew saying: “Shame on you”. In response, verbal
abuse, vile invectives and expressions of hatred were hurled at me by some of
my Jewish friends. I was stunned. How could my comment have provoked more
outrage than the incidents I had posted on my feed?

I was stunned too because most of my
friends are liberal or centre-left (these are generally the default positions
of the Jewish community on many social issues in most parts of the globe) and
would ordinarily condemn this atrocity rather than exonerate it by describing
it as “a casualty of war” in the name of a greater cause such as the
preservation of the existence of the cultural or religious identity of a group.
Yet the reverse was the case.

Indeed, this became evident on July 20, when
the Israel Defence Force (IDF) reported that Hamas had killed 13 Israeli soldiers.
The sentiment of the Jewish community in Great Britain, France and Belgium seemed
to be the same as that of the Israeli public. The loss of these soldiers was in
the most literal sense experienced as a national loss, and resulted in what
could only be described as a day of national mourning (more than 20 000 people
attended the funeral of Sergeant Sean Carmeli, dubbed “the lone soldier”),
whereas the loss of that one five-month-old baby did not evoke nearly as much
of an outcry.

Yet most of those who replied to my
Facebook post would, in other circumstances, find the killing of a child by a
soldier more morally repugnant than the killing of a soldier by another
soldier. This contradiction struck me as bizarre. It was suggestive of a myopia
affecting the general public in Israel and the Jewish community more generally.

Since the war on Gaza began, a virulent
propaganda war has been going on on many social media, particularly on Twitter
and Facebook, between pro-Israelis and anti-Israelis, with pro-Israelis using
standard propaganda techniques.

There are videos and articles representing
the cruelty and barbarity of Hamas and the Palestinians, which is meant to
justify Israel’s continued war against them and the uselessness of engaging them
in any form of dialogue. There are ad hominem arguments, such as the use of videos
of Arab-Muslims condemning Islam as a religion of hatred and most Arabs as
terrorists, as well as pictures and videos of the undeniable rise of
anti-Semitism in Europe among migrant Muslim populations, at anti-Israeli
rallies and marches, as seen over the weekend July 19 in Paris, Berlin, Antwerp
and in parts of Sweden, which, however, present the war between Israel and
Hamas as a war between Jews and Muslims. There are pictures of Israel, with a
population of eight-million Jews, surrounded by 400-million Arabs waiting for and
preying on their destruction, which is meant to create a bond between all Jews
against an amorphous Arab population, and so on.

As a result of this propaganda, it has
become difficult for a Jewish person to recognise that what is at stake in the
war between Israel and Hamas is the illegal occupation of parts of the West
Bank and Gaza, the control of their water supply and energy, and the Palestinians’
rightful claim to a sovereign state and homeland. This is because what is now
at stake for a Jewish person is one’s own cultural identity as a member of the
Jewish people, yet an identity that is being used and manipulated by
pro-Israeli propaganda in such a way as to make it seem that the maintenance of
Jewish culture is inconsistent with the demands of Palestinians as Muslims.

In response to my “Shame on you” comment in
Hebrew on Facebook, a friend of mine in Israel wrote: “For all that the Jews
have sacrificed over the centuries just to survive … It is truly gutting to see
how one of ‘our own’ has turned against his people.”

I asked her what her Jewish heritage had
taught her. I told her it has taught me what it’s like to be in exile, what’s
it like to be persecuted, and what it’s like to have your family killed just
because of their religion, and that this past and memory that I carry obliges
me to stand with any group or individual who find themselves in similar
circumstances. She did not directly respond to my statement. Instead, she
continued talking to me about the rise of anti-Semitism.

This has in fact been one of the most
effective strategies used by this and by past Israeli governments, and is
likely to deepen the divide within the Jewish community between right- and left-wing
Jews and, correlatively, between second- and third-generation Holocaust survivors:
the presentation of the war against Hamas and the Palestinians as a Jewish, a cultural
or religious issue, instead of as a political one.

This image continues to mobilise in its
support Jewish people from around the world. It also continues to desensitise
them to the atrocities committed by the Israeli government and to blind them to
the legitimate demands of the Palestinians for a homeland and a Palestinian
state.

Yet if the Israeli government is making the
Jewish people responsible for its deeds by waging war in its name, then it lies
first and foremost with the Jewish people to protest against the Israeli
government. The crimes the government commits will inevitably weigh on the
conscience and on the memory and history of the Jewish people.